The Mythical Full-Length Mirror of Self

Each of us, in turn, must go to a place and stand in front of The Mythical Full-Length Mirror of Self, if we are in fact to heal. It is a place where we come to know and see probably for the first time just how much “stuff” we really carry and how it drags us down and holds us from our future. The one we were intended to have.

To Heal we must own it! And become ready to consider casting it off.

The Process of Recovery is described as Uncover, Discover and Discard.

People have to know what they are up against. Where and how we carried it, and how our sense of evil spiritedness, of not being good enough, sometimes called incubus (from the Latin: evil spirited, devil or demon.)  Things, metaphorically mostly, that most of us believe are locked down inside us and run our lives...

It locks us into our guilt, hurt, pain and shame. How this burden of guilt, hurt, pain and shame serves as the drive engine for the behaviours that we hate about ourselves.

Those behaviours we can’t seem to stop doing and the ones that are killing us, the ones, oddly enough that we are trying to give up.

Ashamed and isolated and in the middle of a world,

That is full of people who are ashamed and isolated too,

Just like me and too terrified to admit it.

So now the opportunity sits here before me,

An opportunity both figuratively and literally,

To do something for the first time,

That is constructive,

About the state of my being.

If God is Not Lost ...

It was some time ago now, but one Sunday morning I sat bolt upright in bed, it was the 28th of March 2000, it was a sleep-in kind of a day … the title and the preface was there simply starring back at me, so there I sat in my house coat very busily writing out these thoughts as the sprang to mind. This is one of the writing project that if I get the time I will expand it.

First and most profound …

If God’s not lost then why am I out looking for Him???

That one set me back on my heals … I mean … wow … what preponderance. There are several corollaries to this and they are as follows:

First … it also struck me that most of us are so busy trying to find our mythical centers. We miss the fact that we are on a pendulum like journey through both time and space. This journey causes us to pass through our centers only from time to time. Now that was important because it follows that most of the time … we are actually some place other than our centers.  That is the way of things … a necessary definition of the journey. The term from time to time is only a point of reference; it is not a condition of existence.

So most of the time is not one of those occasions or places when we are there at our centers; so it follows that if we are in fact on the journey that we think we are then we are not supposed to be at our idealized centers most of the time. If we were supposed to be there then it follows that our maker in all his or her wisdom would have placed us there … but He didn’t and here we are roaming through the universe in search of something that is not lost … Is it possible that we are just ignorant of the both the journey and the destination.

Second … now that does not mean our center is unavailable to us, it simply means that we are not there in it at this moment. This is an important concept … Most feel or think that being at the center is the ideal … the thing that needs to happen for bliss and spiritual fulfillment to come our way … but what if that is a false myth of enormous proportions.

Third …What also struck me was that I could with very little effort communicate with my center by simply applying the Steven Spielberg concept of “ET phone home”. Just how you phone home is your particular conundrum, but my suggestion is, keep it simple.

Fourth ... Skiing, tennis, sex and skydiving are all richer ways to reach your center … where as prayer … meditation … or journaling are the simpler … my suggestion is to facilitate the basic idea of Keep It Simple … but I have jumped from perfectly good airplanes and survived to tell the tale.

How you do this connecting up stuff is your problem.

It really matters not.

Simply doing it, how is not so important as just get on with doing it ... by writing, thinking, wondering, risk taking, meditating, running or being in service and the list is endless. It is not what you are doing it is why ... that is all that is important.

You don’t have to agree or even like those four thoughts, just work it to the best of your ability on any given day, then leave them go. That is the only rule. Give it some of your conscious mind’s time each day … that is all … then give it the space to go to work for you on its own ... on the deeper side of things ... in a place where your ego does not have access

Myself, I like writing, but that’s me.

I journal and journal and journal and that process gives me a sense of soulful satisfaction that really gives me that sense of connectedness to all that is …

The particular thought that got me going on this tangent was:

Change - real change - comes from the inside out. It does not come from hacking at the leaves of our attitudes and our behaviors with quick fix personality techniques. It comes from striking at the heart - the fabric of our thought, our fundamental, essential belief structures, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world. It becomes important for us to support within ourselves what we want to become, and we can do so by our interacting with others and formally supporting in them what they want to become. 

A WorkShop

What Scott M Peck Calls “Cheap Forgiveness

I, like Peck, have noticed that many people come into the therapeutic process and announce as quickly as they can ... that ... yes ... they had difficult childhoods, and ... yes ... their parents did the best they could and that they have forgiven them for all of it. 

But if the individual gives the therapeutic process enough room and time they always discover they have not forgiven anyone at all ... they are using their prespective as a diversion away from their legitimate pain.

This is what is sometimes called the Egyptian River Syndrome ... DE-NIAL.

There is a period of time where the individual will feel like they are putting their loved ones on trial. For them it really does seem that way.  In actual fact, what they are doing is coming to terms with what really happened.

This is not about whom the parents or the family members are or were, or even who the individual is ... it is about what really happened ... it is about a system that really did not work ... it simply is the truth of it all ...

Most often as not ... it's the system that did not work.

We naturally want to assess blame ... blame helps us defend us from our legitimate suffering.

But once one gets past that blaming thing, and just face the way it was ... It Is In This Space of No Active Defence Strategy ... Where Healing Happens ...

Blame Is An Old School Dysfunction ...

When Control Breaks Down ...

Use Blame ...

So When You Stop And Think About It,

Cheap Forgiveness Is Not So Cheap.

It Can Cost Us Our Life ...

Life's Conundrum

Life’s Conundrum: How Do I Help Those Who Have Something That Repulses?

What I have found is that if I encourage those who seem to carry that which repulses to explore that very thing, the remedy is always held someplace deep in the exploration of their own pain, hurt and rejection.  It really is in there someplace.  They just have to find it.  Another oddity is that, as they find the resolution, become comfortable with it, and are no longer overpowered by it, the issue seems to lose the quality of repulsion and they are no longer projecting that out onto the world.

No Longer At Odds With Everything

It is a truth that those who have little room for their own pain and cannot accept pain as a normal and natural part of their life, seldom, if ever, encourage others to enter directly into an experience with their feelings (which could promote a more intimate understanding of this feeling and thus soften the resist­ance to pain that the feeling engendered in the first place). 

Resistance to pain only serves, in the long run, to enhance the pain.  Thus, examining it in some depth can serve to relieve the pain. 

"It isn't just the pain in my body that really hurts.  It's all the pains of my life that I have to pull away from; that which has imprisoned me in my impression of how I think life should be. Beginning to see my feelings just as they are brings me to a point of recognizing just how little time I have given to having real feelings in my life, including my pain, both physical and psychological."

As they began to notice that they had never fully met themselves in life or dealt with these feelings or, for that matter, their own immortality (because they had always been encouraged to withdraw from what was predetermined to be un­pleasant or painful and then labeled as bad or wrong) what they discovered was that the very thought of unpleasant acted as keeper of the keys.  They were, in effect, their own jailer.

"The Greater the Artist

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talanted as a consolation prize." ~ Robert Hughes, Art Critic

A Prayer to Start Your Day

Put before me what You would have me do today and with Your strength, wisdom and aid I'll give it a whirl ... Amen